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In the early spring of 1984 I drove to Pietrasanta to work in marble at the studio of SemGhelardini. I was something of an anomaly there, even in this “off-season”. Sem’s was a reknowned studio, but I wasn’t a big-name or big-project artist bringing work to the artigiani, the stone carving workers of the studio. And I wasn’t a student come to learn from Sem the process of making sculpture in marble by copying from a maquette, enlarging a model. I simply wanted to carve directly, by hand, any inexpensive pieces of marble available at the studio.
I worked on 4 pieces in the round and a bas relief. I took all of them back to Lacoste, but the bas relief was stolen before I could finish it. The others I continued to work on over that year and the following year(s). They are all about the bible story, the myth in a sense, of Suzanne and the Elders. As in earlier work on Icarus and Ezekiel I was thinking about Suzanne herself: the shock when she realizes the elders are watching her bathe, triggering the onset of self-consciousness. Also, in general, what is the first experience of self-consciousness? How does it come upon the individual: inner impetus? -or external trigger? I was interested in how to express emotional-psychological events such as this in gesture of the body, particularly the torso. It’s as if the history of each human body is the registry of these gestures.Each gesture of the torso as the result of, a depiction of, the recognition of the emotion in the physical core….And the meeting of the divine and the human. Suzanne, up until this incident with the Elders, had been divine in her innocence and lack of self-consciousness, she felt no shame or embarrassment. Divine also in her thusly unsullied physical form. And now her knowledge of corruption starts. The Elders aresupposed figureheads of the divine, but they cause her “downfall” into not only self-consciousness but the beginning of knowledge of sin.
I continued to make large outdoor assembled pieces in 1989 and 1990, and did some smaller pieces, assemblages and stone work. The assembled pieces I still regarded as metaphysical “machines” that told their own story through their “function”. Just enough information of what they were intended to “do”, so that a viewer could be drawn to figure it out or perhaps make their own stories.
All of them, from 1988 and the three below, were “up” on the land around my house for three or four years.
